Flutter
by floorboards
Summary: Three nightmares Remus wakes up from, and one he doesn't. RLSB. Oneshot.


Rating: R for graphic/disturbing violence and some language.  
A/N: First fic on my new account oho. I wrote this while listening to Sigur Rós and avoiding an IB English paper. Angst and procrastination make for lovely art, if I do say so myself. As a general rule, I hate with a burning, burning passion when authors make Remus all weepy and girlish, and I sure as hell hope I didn't do that here. But I also hope I didn't make him sound like a serial killer, because that would also be rather unfortunate. If either ends up being the case, feel free to throw virtual rocks from your end of the internet. Cheers.

* * *

_Sirius is dead. _

_As good as dead, anyway. Hands are hot against Sirius' chest, and Remus' muscles barely strain with the effort of pushing him forward. Over and out. He watches the scene in slow-motion, like a clock ticking to midnight or a soap-bubble that expands and bursts into nothingness. Letting go. The slip, the fall. The aftermath. _

_Words are dribbling from Sirius' lips, staining their way down his front, each one tinged with the kind of realization, the kind of dread and imminent doom that no one, especially headstrong, forever-young Sirius, could see until the last possible second. He's stuttering now, speech knotting around his tongue, but Remus can't hear a word over the sound of his own heartbeat, keeping desperate time as Sirius stumbles over the edge-_

_Remus sprints towards him but it's too late, everything is over, and with harsh, angry breaths, he peers over the side of the building, watches Sirius spiral to the ground, face-first, wind catching around his limbs, twisting and turning until he hits pavement with a sickening crack-_

_How many stories, how many flights of stairs, how many windows-_

_How many people must be standing there, down on the sidewalk-?_

_And the limbs mangled and the blood-_

_And the blood-_

_He can't look away. He can't look away, so he covers his eyes. For a long time, he simply holds one shaking hand over his face, until something soft touches it. A moth has latched on to his pinky. Remus flicks his wrist to shake it off, but pain shoots through his palm, as though a pin is passing through the skin where the moth contacts it. He flicks his wrist again, in agony, and it speaks. _

"_You could have stopped it, you know."_

_It sounds like-_

"_It was your fault. I didn't have to fall, and you didn't have to kill me-"_

_It sounds like Sirius' voice-_

_Desperately, Remus tries to remove the creature with his free hand, but stops short in his tracks, limbs going limp. A hundred, a thousand of them, tiny and brown and fluttering, are creeping across the sky towards him. They rise from thin air and seem to be speaking as one, chanting in unison, keeping time with the blood pounding in Remus' veins. _

"_You- you- you- you- you-"_

_And they don't even have to finish the sentence, because Remus knows what the rest of the phrase is; he knows the variety of possibilities, the infinite number of ways to say the same thing, to reach the same consensus. To brand him as the same breed of killer. The same species of murderer. The sickest kind, the ones that sit by while their lovers fall to their deaths._

_The moths are everywhere. Lining his jaw, burrowing in his belly, tearing at his hair. Remus sinks to his knees and doesn't scream and doesn't scream and doesn't scream as the world around him dissolves into vibrant, flaming needles burning through every inch of- _

Remus awakes with a start. "Sirius, Sirius, I didn't mean to-"

He's babbling, hands gesturing, arms flailing, trying in vain to communicate his grave error. Remus' hands are clumsy, groping. He doesn't remember ever being quite so terrified of anything before, real or imagined, neither as a dreaming child nor within the dark confines of his mind in his later years. Even as strong arms close tight around his waist, and stubble brushes the back of his neck, he keeps speaking, hoping that Sirius understands the words, the apologies, the pleas.

And the syllables and syntax and complete thoughts are losing their coherency and bleeding out into the air, devolving into mere sounds, noises, breaths. The dull staccato of his own voice and the steady rhythm of Sirius' whisper form a hum, an arcing, invisible cocoon around the pair, intertwined; lost in the place between sleep and wakefulness, lost in noise, lost in their own confusion. Over and over again, Remus reasserts his confession, but Sirius is there and alive, surprised at the trembling form in his arms, and he gently soothes into Remus' hair that everything will be all right.

- -

_Sirius is dead. _

_As good as dead, anyway. Remus can smell his blood nearby, distinct in the crisp forest air. He tilts his nose skyward, towards the full moon, and howls. _

_He's been prowling for hours, smelling every breed and every flavor of blood on this side of London. Bodies that are full and ripe and alive, life that is begging to be torn from its confines, life that is begging to be consumed, fed off of. Remus longs for that moment of separation, when mind and body diverge. The sublimation of thoughts and feelings into a mangled, irreparable mess. Soul returning to nature. As it should be. _

_There's only one that he wants, though. Only one he needs to destroy. _

_It's been a challenge, holding out all night. It still is. Then there's the process of locating the human, of trapping him, and then exacting an effective plan of attack. A growl rises in Remus' throat. He has been growing impatient in his searching, spending hours on end with no meal, no retribution. Fury rises like bile in his throat, foaming forth and dripping along his jaw. _

_He can see the lights from the nearest village. He can see them he can see them he can see-_

_Him._

_Sirius stands in a clearing at the edge of the woods, back turned, cigarette latched between two fingers. And it begins. Adrenaline boils below Remus' fur, searing and popping and aching to break free. Moving fast enough to leave burns on the inside of his skin. God. Yes. _

_But there is no God. No spirit, no prayer, no confession. Only deliverance, hot and ready to spark across the sky. Remus breaks into a run, unable to contain it any longer. He craves this, craves him. Craves what it will sound like when those bones crack beneath him when he knocks Sirius to the ground. _

_The human breaks beautifully. Remus strikes from behind, sinks claws into the marrow of his shoulder, through layers and layers of cloth. He forces Sirius to the ground, who cries out, cheek in the dirt. Giant extremities tear at what they can, with force, with scrabblings and blows everywhere he can reach. The expanse of Sirius' back is his for the taking. Lit cigarette lost in the scuffle, it lands, upon a pile of dry leaves beside them, which erupts into brilliant, screaming flame. _

_Sirius cries out again, struggling to get free, searching for his wand, searching for his strength and dignity, and Remus flips him now, forces him to his back. With a foot, he crushes Sirius' collarbone. The shatter echoes off the trees. He smothers Sirius' mouth with fur, and drags claws over the torn remains of his clothing until what he's waited for his there, is visible. _

_His heart. _

_Stilling for only an instant, Remus places one hulking paw over the right region of the human's chest. The beast shudders with impulse, letting musky air in through his nose. With a growl, Remus leans in, and drags his teeth along the skin. The blood lurks so closely under the surface that Remus feels dizzy from need. He lets his teeth sink in slightly, drawing the lightest of drops, eliciting the loudest yet of screams. Drawing a harsh claw across the human's face, redness slides into the man's crevices: eyes, nose, mouth, and he falls quiet, save for the gurgling suffocation of blood and vomit and saliva in his living, throbbing throat. _

_Remus bares his teeth, lips sliding back and away from the row of glistening white monsters. He wants to look into the human's eyes before he kills him. He wants him to be afraid in his final moments, wants to see the most real, the most alive and _human_ of emotions pouring across his features when he digs in._

_Skin taut and white, Remus eagerly runs his snout along the place on Sirius' chest where crimson rivulets are already rising to the surface. It's been too long already. Now is the moment. In one vicious gesture, Remus rams his teeth, like daggers, into Sirius's skin, shaking his jaw, pulling the skin forth, the muscle, the life, the life, the life. The blood is scalding as it gushes between his lips, the meat raw and tangy. _

_And the smoke spiraling towards the moon-_

_And the light-_

_And the smell-_

_And Sirius-_

The sheets are twisted around his ankles. A cold sweat has broken out onto his forehead. Flat on his back, he looks up into the face of a very alive Sirius and tries to breathe evenly.

"Are you all right?" Sirius asks cautiously.

Remus tries to muster a grimace and nods. "Fine," he mumbles, and the word feels hot on his lips. Sirius reaches for him, but Remus rolls away and refuses to make eye contact. "It's nothing, just a dream."

"A nightmare?" The word sounds childish and laughable, even though he knows Sirius has no ill intent.

"No," Remus says quickly. "Not as such." He can't stand being thought of as weak, as pitiable, as the type that wakes from the dream world with sweaty palms and incomprehensible mutterings. Cheeks burning, he sits up on the edge of the bed, looking pointedly at his toes and calculating the easiest and quickest way to end this conversation.

Sirius shifts across the bed, toward him. "About what?"

He stiffens, fumbling for an answer. "I- it was- Nothing. Don't worry about it."

"You were talking in your sleep." Remus feels Sirius' hands contact the backs of his shoulders, and he shudders, trying to shake them off, but Sirius persists. He noses at the back of Remus' ear, breath tickling the skin when he speaks.

Remus feels filthy, raw. "Was I?"

Sirius' hands move softly across Remus' inflamed back, rubbing in small circles. "Mm-hm. Saying all sorts of things. Mostly I couldn't make much sense of it, but you kept repeating words. _No_ and _Don't_ and-" his voice catches. "You kept saying _Sirius._"

"Oh." Remus tries not to sound too hoarse.

"You- you do that a lot, you know. You say those words often in- in your sleep." He swallows. "And you don't always wake up from it. Sometimes you talk or cry out or- or move around for a while, but stay asleep. Until it subsists, and it's as if nothing happened." He pauses, thoughtfully, and his hands slow. "Moony. You say my name a lot."

Remus twists around, eyeing Sirius with suspicion. "What's that supposed to mean?" he asks aggressively.

"Nothing," Sirius is clearly taken aback by the defense. "I was just wondering-" Brow furrowed, he weighs the words carefully. His eyes are tormented, searching Remus' own. It takes him a long time to finish his thought, and Remus grows antsy.

"Just wondering _what, _Sirius?"

"Was I hurting you?"

Remus stops. "What?"

"Was I- In your dream. Was I hurting you?"

_Oh God, never. _"No. _No. _Jesus, no, Sirius, you weren't hurting me."

"Are you sure?"

Remus opens his mouth to speak, and realization dawns on him. Sirius, his fearful eyes and tender words. Sirius, always at the ready in the middle of the night, always reaching for Remus. Sirius, believing for weeks and weeks now that he was the one to cause the nightmares, the babbling, the sweating, the fear. _He thinks he's the source of- the reason for all of the- _"Is that what you've been worried about?"

Sirius twitches. "_Worried _is a curious word."

Running his hands wearily over his face, Remus lets air deeply into his lungs. He rests his fingers on Sirius' knees and speaks softly, leaning in close. "That's not why I didn't want to tell you what happened in my- Look, they're not like that. I promise."

Skeptic, Sirius quirks an eyebrow. "You promise that they're not about me?"

"Yes. No. I mean. I- I didn't say that."

"So they _are_ about me, then?"

"Well- yes. But they're not about you hurting me."

"You don't fucking sound like you're having a whole lot of fun, Moony," Sirius says dryly.

"They're not pleasant," Remus says shortly. "And you _are _in them, but you're not what makes them unpleasant."He thinks about this for several seconds. "Sort of."

"_Sort of? _What the fuck, Remus, _sort of?"_

"Calm down," Remus hisses. "They're not any of your business in the first place!"

"You're having dreams every other night about me and it's not my business?" Sirius' voice is rising to a shout.

"Certainly not! Not with the _nature _of those dreams. And they're _just dreams, _Sirius!"

"Just dreams? Just dreams about me hurting you? Me _killing _you?"

"No! Just dreams about _me _killing _you!"_

A striking and immediate silence falls over them. Remus wants nothing more than to crawl beneath the bed and die. Sirius looks as though he's been punched in the stomach. "Oh," he whispers blandly.

"How?" Sirius asks eventually, voice even. "How were you killing me?"

_I'll never understand you_, Remus thinks to himself, knowing better than to say it our loud. He just blinks in disbelief.

"If you don't want to tell me, that's fine, but I'd like to know." Sirius' expression is maddeningly calm.

Remus blinks again. He has the sudden urge to drop something heavy, to hear it hit the ground with a satisfying crack. Sounds from the dream flash through his mind and he considers the distinct possibility of vomiting, or crying. Lips bitten hard, he shakes his head and lies down. Turning away, he pulls the covers tight around his body. Suddenly he's angry, but himself or at Sirius, he doesn't know. Maybe both. And he certainly won't grace Sirius with an answer to the question, not when he had the nerve to inquire into the nuances of the innermost, sacred, terrifying depths of Remus' very confidential mind.

"Goodnight, Sirius," he says to the wall. Remus feels as though for once he's asserting his own independence, for once. Not submitting to something as easy and soft as a pair of willing hands. He's pulling away from the very thing he wanted most of all, for so long, in the long nights and during freezing winter months; the comfort that now makes him ill to consider.

- -

_Sirius is dead. _

_As good as dead, anyway. Remus moves like a robot, his extremities overheating, short-circuiting, out of his control. There's a knife, and there is a fist tight around it, and it takes several seconds for Remus to recognize the scene for what it really is. _

_Sirius is backing up slowly, towards the kitchen sink. He eyes his wand, dropped to the floor several feet away from where Remus is standing. Remus can tell that Sirius is speaking, but the words are no more than mouthed, never finding structure, never serving as a possibility for diplomacy. The words are the first victims of the scuffle, the massacre, and there will be many more before the number is up. _

_Unconstrained, Remus lets loose a loud cry, a battle shout, and charges. There is nothing for Sirius to defend himself with, no weapon on his end of the war, and Remus doesn't think twice. He drives the knife in, without preface, without preparation, and yanks it back. Over and and over again, blade slicing across Sirius' features, his perfect features, his portions and ratios and beauty. Remus likes to watch them severed and dismembered, to see what once was sharp and geometric now be malleable and rough. _

_He lets the body fall. _

_Looking down, Remus realizes that blood stains his own hands, too, caked and old. "How-?" he tries to say, but a harsh, bubbling pain erupts in his throat. He reaches up to find that blood is leaking down his own neck from a gash, three inches thick, just below his Adam's apple. The weapon falls to the ground with a clatter that Remus never hears, never acknowledges over the sound of his own voice, his own sudden, sobbing screech in the darkness-_

He's screaming when he wakes up.

As he comes to, he hears his own voice echoing off the walls, bouncing back to assault his senses. Instinctively, he brings a hand up to his throat, and finds it perfectly intact.

Sirius watches from his own regions of the bed, keeping his distance. "You were having a night terror." He frowns. By now he has good enough sense to stay away, to not touch Remus after one of these episodes, but the worry is etched in every line on his face. Remus doesn't like it when Sirius tries to call it something that it isn't, offering excuses and half-hearted remedies in the form of a misnomer. As though adding the word _terror _to it makes it any less awful. Any less shameful.

"No," Remus sighs. "It was just a dream." Just a dream and Remus wonders how many people must have dreams every night, all over the world. He wonders if he's the only one over the age of nine to awake from them with uncontrollable and accidental anguish.

"Was it- was it another one of _those?"_

Remus looks at Sirius' hands, which are tight in the bedsheets. "Yes. Please don't be angry." He has pointedly avoided asking Sirius how he feels about all of this, and now doesn't seem to be a particularly appropriate time, either.

"Angry? Fuck, no. Of course not, Moony. You can't control what you dream about." But there's something telling and nervous in Sirius' voice when he moves to pull Remus into a smothering embrace. His hands are everywhere, tracing patters down Remus' ribcage. Remus feels as though his very veins are on fire.

"You're very close," Remus hears himself saying. And then, "I feel sick."

Sirius lets go. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you." This all sounds dull and scripted. Sirius fidgets. Remus catches him casting a patronizing glance over Remus' body, as if searching for the answer to Remus' ineptitude and madness in his taut skin. Remus imagines Sirius' thoughts: _What the hell, can't even take a hug, too busy fantasizing about killing me, too busy being such a weird little fuck. _

Remus winces at the imagined verbal barbs. "I'm sorry," He echoes.

"No, I am," Sirius replies, and Remus wishes that Sirius wouldn't _do _this, wouldn't try to keep up with the tumultuous, perpetual tango that is Remus' subconscious: twisting and tumbling and dipping in elaborate, complicated patterns with esoteric footwork that no one, not even Remus himself, could explain if he tried.

Remus wonders from time to time why Sirius stays with him. Usually the musing is vague and quickly forgotten, but now the probability and possibility of Sirius being dissatisfied, or worse, leaving, feels proximate and imminent. There would be no shortage of reasons for it. The lycanthropy, his scrawny body, the fact that everything he owns smells like Earl Grey. The fact that he's barely changed since his was seventeen, still idealistic and awkward as ever. And the dreams. These new, jutting developments that stick and poke into everywhere in their relationship that Remus thought he'd finally gotten under control.

"What can I do for you?" Sirius asks quietly.

Remus shakes his head, not trusting his words to respond for him. It sounds like a proposition. It sounds like more than an innocent question, and Remus hates himself for doubting Sirius' intentions.

"What can I do?" Sirius asks again, sinking into the pillows and pulling Remus with him. They lay, on their sides, staring at each other. Remus still has nothing to say.

Gingerly, Sirius traces a fingertip around Remus' lips. His eyes are huge and unseeing in the darkness. "What can I do for you?" he says yet again. "What will make you happy?"

"It's not a matter of happy," Remus breathes, and Sirius' finger briefly slides against his teeth as he speaks. "You already make me happy." He doesn't remember when their conversations became this simple, condensed to such juvenile emotions, such basic, cloying ideas. He hates it. Remus doesn't like distilling his most intimate thoughts to just whispered words in the middle of the night. A thesis would be nice, and factual, supporting evidence of why he feels the way he does. Not this. Not these primitive phrases, too revealing, too exposing.

"I want you to be safe," Sirius continues. Their bodies are closer now, and Remus wishes for the courage to press himself up against Sirius' heated form. But it would be desperate, needy, pointless. "All right?" Sirius asks. Remus shakes his head distantly.

"No."

"No?" Without Remus having to move, Sirius closes the gap between their chests. Their noses touch. Sirius has one palm open on the small of Remus' back, whose spine is suddenly electrified. "What is it?" Sirius whispers. "What am I doing wrong?"

"No," Remus says again, because it seems like an apt, albeit grammatically insufficient, response. His throat burns.

"Moony_."_ He kisses Remus' nose, once, twice. Then his forehead. Then his earlobe. "Remus, Remus, _Remus_."

"Too gentle," Remus hears himself saying in a voice that is far smaller than it should be. "Too tender. Too kind." Remus' voice cracks, and he squeezes his eyes shut, horrified. Emotion is not what he wants. Confession is not what he wants.

"What, then?" Sirius asks, as though reading his mind.

It takes a long time for Remus to choke out a barely audible, "I think I love you. I don't know," but when he does, the recognition seems to lift weight from every bone in his body. His head suddenly feels quite light with his own misgivings and indecisions out in the air. "Padfoot. I need something and I don't know. I don't know what." The words sound foreign in his mouth, and he wonders if it was a mistake to say them.

But Sirius knows what he means, and draws him nearer still. His fingers tangle in the hair at the back of Remus' neck, bring Remus' head to rest against his collarbone. Sirius presses his lips to one closed eyelid. "Then I'll wait until you do."

- -

Sirius is dead.

As good as dead, anyway. The light soars across the room, burning against Remus' eyes when he looks directly at her wand, directly at the beam, directly at the body, directly at-

_It's not him, it's not him-_

He thinks that he's gone blind, or that he's hallucinating, because it was never like this before. He's seen Sirius die, over and over again, but he's never seen Sirius die like this, noble, in battle, laugher still painted on his face. At the hand of another.

For all his horror and gore, not once did Remus think that _magic _would betray them in the end, that the last moments would be spent with an unused defense hanging from his lips. And this is too simple, this is too easy, this is too clear-cut and even. It's an exact science, killing Sirius Black; it is not, as Remus so long suspected, an art. It's a mathematical equation with variables and inequalities and a space for Remus to equal the sum of the time spent worrying about said killing. For Remus to be a constant variable: always there, but never playing a real part in the action.

Everything is too bright and too far away. Remus lets the heaviness in his limbs take over, speaking slowly in words that he doesn't remember after they leave his lips. Words he didn't know he knew. And his body is drifting, not through space or time or through a veil, but through a dark tunnel with sloping walls and no light at the end. He moves like a feather or a madman, and lets the scene spring, brightly, before his eyes, over and over and over and over until he can't breathe anymore, more worried about his lungs than about his heart. The heart will take care of itself. It always does. There's no reason to force the realization now because the aortas and arteries will tell him when the time is right to scratch and twitch and cry, and in the meantime, Remus exists only in bursts of ten seconds at a time, half-moving, half-living, half-gone-

Hours later, he collapses into bed- _Our bed, the bed we share-_ and only stares at the ceiling for a few brief minutes, his body heavy, sinking into the mattress. Remus contemplates what it would feel like to be pushed off of a building or be ripped to pieces by animalistic teeth or be stabbed in the face with a kitchen knife or be hit by a ray of bright, bright light-

To float upwards, but weightless, careless, free of physical attachments, free of fear-

_Dying must feel a lot like love feels_, he thinks.

Remus lets his fitful deliberations teeter off into tormented, shaky sleep.

_- -_

In the middle of the night, Remus wakes.

The pillow is cold. Someone left the window open. Moths are collecting on the ceiling. It was probably Sirius' mistake, always smoking inside and needing to let in fresh air; always forgetting to shut things, close things, lock things. A quiet smile plays on Remus' lips. "Sirius, look what you've done," he calls to the bathroom. "You forgot to close the window, and now there's an entire colony of moths who want to live with us and feed off of our clothing."

_God, what a terrible dream. _

He rises. At the window, he tries to reach and shoo the moths away, but he's not tall enough, and they stay stuck, stubbornly, like butter in a pan, like coffee stains.

"Sirius? When you're done in the bathroom, maybe you could you maybe get rid of these…"

He trails off. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of no light under the doorway, hears no running water, senses no presence. On the bedside table, Sirius' wand is gone. A chill runs through Remus' lungs. Rooted in place, he surveys the scene and tries to make sense of it all. Half of the bed is still made. Remus' clothing is thrown into a heap on the floor, and he doesn't remember being so careless, or why they seem to be singed with dirt and ash and blood-

_Whose blood?_

Fear does not strike him, only a dull throb of pain in his throat. It's as though he knows the answers already, hidden somewhere in the confines of his skin. A curious wave of calm washes through him. For a moment he wonders if he's the only one awake in the whole world, the only one alive. For a moment, he thinks of nothing but what he can see before him. It's as though his imagination has been shattered, his powers of deduction and implication vanished.

He opens the bathroom door and no one is there. Looking at his own reflection, he notices his eyes are red, puffy, oddly as though he's been-

A note, in sloppy, desperate ink, is pinned to the the mirror.

_Remus-_

_Gone to help Harry. Don't know when I'll be back. Please don't come after me. Love you always. _

_-Sirius. _

All at once, the night returns in a rush, memories bunched into tight wads that Remus can't pull apart. Everything piled on top of each other in his consciousness. The fight, the veil, the dais, the light, the light, the light. Remus turns away from the parchment on the mirror, away from his reflection as the events shift and grate against one another, inelegantly shaping themselves into fact. His conscious wears thin under the weight of so much disbelieving grief, so much onerous emptiness. The ache and the pull. The truth and the nightmare are one and the same. And now, truly, permanently, irrevocably, Sirius is gone.

_And it wasn't my fault. _

He stands there in silent shock, under the ancient doorway, staring at the empty room. The wings of a moth brush his face, but this time, when it lands on his cheek, there is no needle, no voice, no swarm. The animal just rests there for a moment, fluttering softly on Remus' wet cheek, before flying away on miniature wings into the welcoming night.

_Fin._

_

* * *

  
_

I love reviews. Even one word reviews. Even flames.


End file.
